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Many students in Minnesota are heading back to school this week. Some are entering new buildings and getting new school supplies with with help of donations. And some public school districts report increased enrollment.
In St. Cloud, school district officials were taken a little by surprise by recent growth.
Superintendent Laurie Putnam said they have about 450 students more than projected in a district with 9,500 total students. The biggest jump is in kindergarten.
St. Cloud hired new teachers to accommodate the growth. Putnam would like to attribute the growth to the district’s efforts to promote values of safety, belonging and academic excellence.
The economy and inflation also could be factors. They’re seeing some students returning to the district from private and parochial schools, possibly because of families struggling to pay tuition.
In southern Minnesota, the Gibbon-Fairfax-Winthrop district in Sibley County is also seeing higher enrollment, with 572 students in its K-12 programs, about 7 percent more than anticipated.
Allen Berg, the district superintendent, said the enrollment picture has been complex and bucks other recent trends.
“Like all of all of Minnesota schools right right now, we’re seeing a decrease in birthing rates across the state of Minnesota. I think I saw a statistic that we’re down like 21 percent across the state since 2007,” he said.
He said predicting enrollment can be “kind of a guessing game.”
“We have been declining, but now we’ve got this bump right now, obviously, that we're we're experiencing,” he said. “So we’re not really sure if the momentum will continue. We hope it does.”
Funding challenges, breakthroughs
St. Cloud was waiting on several million dollars of federal funding that the Trump administration was withholding.
Those funds, which support English learning students, teacher training and literacy training, have since been released. The district received all it expected to receive.
But like other districts, St. Cloud does still face financial challenges — from inflation, changes to state education funding and a gap in special education funding.
Those funds are important because about a quarter of St. Cloud students qualify for special education, and almost that many qualify for English language support.
Putnam said many students and families who live in the St. Cloud school district face financial hardships, and some receive homeless services. She counts nearly 1,000 of students who do not have stable housing and 8,000 who are food insecure.
“It just presents a lot of challenges to making sure that our students have their physical needs met so they can come into our classrooms ready to learn about,” Putnam said.
In the Gibbon-Fairfax-Winthrop district, elementary students are starting the school year in a new building. Middle school and high school students will join them there this winter. Berg said the building is big enough to accommodate the bump in enrollment and any future growth, if it materializes.
The superintendent said the district has been actively recruiting students.
“If students live in our district boundaries and are enrolling in another district, we’ve reached out to them and said, ‘Hey, give us a second look. This is what we’ve been doing since you went to another school district, or since you joined an online school and we’ve got space for you here at GFW,’” Berg said. “So if you want to come back, please come back and we’ll help you out.”
Free school supplies
In St. Cloud, all preschool students in the district and all kindergarten through third grade students at Talahi Community School receive school supplies for the year at no cost to families through a program they’re calling Ready, Set, School.
St. Cloud Rotaract, a local Rotary Club, and a philanthropist couple donated funds. They’re launching the program at Talahi because more than 90 percent of students come from families whose income level qualifies them for free and reduced lunch.
Nykkolette Waugh of St. Cloud was at Talahi with her first-grade daughter, Zendaya Morris, for a conference. Waugh said she thinks the community providing free school supplies to families is a great idea.
“There’s a lot of families I know that can’t afford certain things and then they get help from like the county or other family members," she said. “So having it donated to the school actually was really amazing.”
The goal is to eventually expand it to all elementary school students across the district.
“We don’t know about those kind of hidden choices and other stressors that they’ve got beyond the school walls that they have to take care of, to just get their kid here to school every morning and to be ready to learn,” said Talahi principal Sam Court.
“Our students come up and they are the most amazing little learners ever. But to know that that's again, one less pressure, one less ask that we’ve got for them, I think, is going to make, it makes a big difference.”
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